After a video of the Oklahoma University Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter yelling a racist chant went viral Sunday night, the national fraternity closed the Oklahoma chapter and the university president ordered them to have all of their belongings out by “midnight [Tuesday].”
“As far as I’m concerned, it won’t be back, at least not while I’m president of this university,” Oklahoma University president David Boren said in a press conference late Monday morning.
The video shows fraternity members on a bus, chanting, “There will never be a n----r in SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me.”
Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s national headquarters apologized for the behavior of the individuals in the video in a statement published on Twitter.
“We are disgusted that any member would act in such a way,” the statement said. “This type of racist behavior will not be tolerated and is not consistent with the values and morals of our fraternity.”
Ball State’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter directed The Daily News to Brandon Weghorst, associate executive director of communications for Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Weghorst did not respond for comment.
Malik Ojuri, a sophomore accounting and finance major and a member of Alpha Tau Omega, said he thought it was a pretty bad situation for Greek Life as a whole, as well as Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
“I’m an African American male in an IFC fraternity, ... and I know when someone like me joins a fraternity that is very similar to SAE, I want to be welcome,” Ojuri said. “It’s a bad look for all Greek life because we already have so many negative connotations against us. So when that chapter of SAE does something like this, not only does it make Greek Life look bad, but it turns away people who could look at Greek Life in a positive light.”
Ojuri said the members’ chant sounded like something they had learned and said before, something that was second nature to all of them.
“I don’t think racism [should] be second nature,” he said.
Ojuri said the video made the fraternity seem like a joke.
“As a Greek male myself, it’s everything we work against. [Ignorance] and bigotry – we work against that,” he said.
Ojuri is originally from upstate New York, and he said since New York and Oklahoma are places that look at racism and the N-word in different lights, if this had happened in New York, it would have been taken a lot more seriously.
“I think the punishment was a start, but I honestly think this isn’t something they came up with the day before, this is something that was taught, just like racism,” Ojuri said. “Racism is taught. No one is born saying, ‘I hate black people,’ or, ‘I hate Mexican people.’”
But even so, Ojuri said he thinks Sigma Alpha Epsilon will be able to move past the video’s backlash.
“As a whole, Greek Life, we have worked toward this and have to work away from this, because I don’t think I would have even been able to be a member of Alpha Tau Omega or Sigma Alpha Epsilon 50, 40 maybe even 30 years ago,” he said. “But I do think that it’s hard. It looks bad, and it looks really bad on Greek Life, but extremely bad on SAE.”
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